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Twitter finally has a new CTO. The role had been empty since May 2011, when former CTO Greg Pass left the company. Stepping up is the company's former vice president of application development, Adam Messinger. There's no official word from Twitter as of yet, but Messinger has updated his Twitter and LinkedIn profile with his new title.
Since Pass left the company, engineering decisions have been made by Messinger and vice president of infrastructure Chris Fry. AllThingsD first reported Messinger's change in title, and its story also points out that Fry now seems to be vice president of all engineering, not just infrastructure. Also, the design team will apparently no longer report to engineering. Previously, vice president of design, Mike Davidson, reported to Messinger. But now vice president of product Michael Sippey has a new title: vice president of product and design.
The restructuring -- which follows the promotion of former CFO Ali Rowghani to the COO role, and former vice president of corporate finance and treasurer Mike Guptato to the CFO role -- is seen as a step towards an IPO for the company. But the appointment of Messinger highlights Twitter evolution into a company that is as much about engineering as media.
Messinger joined Twitter from Oracle in 2011. At Oracle, he served as vice president of development and oversaw, among other things, the Java platform. Prior to Oracle, he founded a software delivery optimization company called Gauntlet Systems, which was acquired by Borland in 2006. Messinger worked for Borland until joining Oracle in 2009, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In addition technical details, Messinger has been responsible for keeping Twitter's engineers happy and productive. For example, he managed the integration of teams from companies that Twitter had acquired -- including Posterous and Whisper Systems -- into the larger Twitter ecosystem. When we spoke with Messinger last year he explained that one of the ways he kept teams fresh was to pull together new teams from different existing teams within Twitter and have them work on new projects -- essentially acting as mini-startups within the company.
He also introduced the Innovators Patent Agreement, a scheme to give more power to engineers who create patents filed by the company. Under the agreement, a company may invoke a patent only for "defense purposes," not for litigation, unless it has the permission of the original inventor.
Twitter has been making changes recently, including more restrictive API use policies, winding down old versions of clients such as TweetDeck and an expanded advertising and analytics platform. Messinger will have many challenges ahead of him as he balances the interests of sponsors, users, and developers.
